The Old Woman and the Sea

In January 2017 my husband Eric Sponberg and I departed St. Augustine, FL, on our 35-foot sailboat Corroboree with the goal of sailing around the world. I have no idea whether we will make it. As with any journey, the path is never as straight as you optimistically plan. But you go anyway, in hopes of a great adventure and because you can’t ignore the tug in your heart that beckons you on.

You know that iconic photograph of Machu Picchu, the one that makes you feel like an Andean condor soaring over a lost civilization, a magical kingdom so high in the mountains, so isolated, it seems incredible that humans could ever have lived there at all? It steals your breath away and makes you yearn to […]

When describing a windy passage to family, friends or fellow cruisers, Eric is prone to announce, “It was blowing like stink!” Sometimes, he’s exaggerating. “It was not. It was barely 20 knots,” I’ll correct. I think he just likes using the word “stink.” I myself don’t consider it to be blowing like stink until we […]

I found a sloth! I found a sloth! We knew they were here. Our marina in Panama, called Shelter Bay, sits on the edge of a 14,000-acre swathe of jungle called the San Lorenzo National Park. The dense green tangle is home to exotic birds, capuchin and howler monkeys, sloths, jaguars, ocelots, boas, crocodiles, coatimundis […]

If you’ve never heard of the San Blas Islands, I’m not surprised. If we weren’t cruising, chances are Eric and I wouldn’t know about them either. In fact, we first learned about this string of islands off the Panama coast on our previous voyage 40 years ago. “Oh, it’s beautiful!” other sailors raved. “You must […]

One year ago, on 4 January 2017, Eric and I set sail from St. Augustine in Corroboree with the goal of sailing around the world. So far we have covered 2,895 miles, made 41 landfalls, and added over a dozen new islands and countries to our life list. So when our son Dane and his […]

Corroboree has been in Santa Marta, Colombia for three weeks now, and the single best word to describe this place is wild. First, there’s the wind. Normally strong anyway at this time of year, the eastern trades whip around the northeastern shoulder of Colombia with special intensity, attributable, I think, to the looming Sierra Nevada […]

Before we left St. Augustine, when Eric and I told people about our plan to sail around the world, one of the most frequent questions we were asked was “Are you taking a gun?” Often, it came within the first five queries: “What kind of boat do you have? What route will you follow? What […]

When Corroboree made a night arrival in Bonaire last week, we had the benefit of modern technology, a civilized harbor, and the assistance of a fellow cruiser to help us tie up to a mooring ball in the dark. We had tracked our 390-mile course from Grenada using GPS and navigation aps, and while still […]

Silversands Resort under construction, Grand Anse, Grenada Even before we left Miami, Eric and I were warned by longtime cruisers that we would find cruising in the Caribbean drastically different from what we experienced on Duprass forty years ago. For one thing, cruising yachts have exploded in both size and number. Where Duprass at 27’ […]

To say we’ve been experiencing a lot of rain lately here in Grenada would be an understatement. This past week we have, to varying degrees, been sprinkled, drizzled, showered, pelted, barraged, bucketed, deluged and inundated. We have repeatedly sponged, mopped and toweled our sopping wet cockpit in the quest to create a dry—or at least […]